


Dancing in the Dark

by Lue4028



Series: Rites of Passage [6]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Bromance, Dancing, Gen, M/M, Romance, Slow Dancing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-01
Updated: 2015-08-01
Packaged: 2018-04-12 11:41:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,502
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4477982
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lue4028/pseuds/Lue4028
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock and his diabolical pre-wedding schemes. John never sees it coming. Or maybe he does, but he wants it to happen anyway.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dancing in the Dark

Sherlock is gazing deep into John’s eyes when he makes the startling confession "I don't think this is waltz," confiding in his partner yet another spectacular deduction.

“What do you mean?” John asks obliviously. "I thought.. that's what you were supposed to be teaching me,” he figures, wearing his T-shirt “I’m confused” look, which Sherlock is doubtless familiar with, and judging by the way he’s leering, likely finds it so transparent it’s amusing, or maybe even endearing.

“Well, I was curious so I went ahead and.. experimented a little.” Anyone else, anyone else in that suggestive tone of voice, and John would have thought twice about that sentence, but it’s not anyone else. It’s Sherlock.

“Experimented. A little.”

"I took the liberty of toying with a few alternative styles,” he elaborates with a loopy hand gesture, and John frowns, giving him a sceptical look. “But now you've exhausted every couple’s dance in my repertoire from Bolero to Veleta. And I think you even know ballet,” his voice lifts, interest piqued. 

"Can we get back to waltz?" John sighs, mildly irked he hadn’t noticed that his very own limbs, which, whence last he checked, had been moving predictably in triple meter, had been casually repurposed. Not that he minds learning ballet particularly, just the being-taken-for-a-ride-as-if-he-were-a-bloody-Chevrolet part, blissfully unaware he’d even been high-jacked. Does he not own his body anymore, has it been commandeered as part of Sherlock’s transport?

"What is this?" John asks off-handedly, looking down at their feet, Sherlock’s black oxfords shadowing his Loakes— light brown.

"I have no idea. I'm making it up,” Sherlock mutters offhandedly, and John looks taken aback, flummoxed. This is even worse than looking into his eyes and miraculously knowing waltz… Whether or not it’s possible to know what Sherlock’s going to do before he does it and why he would subject himself to the sheer awkwardness of making it look like he can, he can’t say, but he knows that he must be doing this on purpose, setting himself up; there’s not way he’s not, except for the reality of the fact that… he’s not.

 “Some sort of informal slow dance, I think." Sherlock hazards. His mind, indeed, does seem to have fizzed out of ideas; the lagging tempo, the slurring steps, two bodies in motion, just free-wheeling, the patterns of their feet having devolved into idle weight-shifting, time standing still. The lethargy of it feels bizarre, killing time and gazing at each other, despite the fact they’ve barely any reason to, wearing tenuously thin, verging on no reason at all. Without proper dancing there’s little to no excuse not to stop, not to let go of him, their entire purpose for being together disintegrates.

Or perhaps it proliferates, becomes too blatant to ignore, like that large, white elephant, audience member of one, sitting all sophisticated and in its element over there by the lamp shade and window sill and displaced breakfast table.

Is he seeing things? He’s seeing things.

“It’s a bit..” John’s voice echoes in his head, sounding oddly surreal and foreign.

“I agree it’s kind of..” Sherlock mutters, a little off kilter, struggling to place what exactly the vague, hypnotic vibe is, coming off the motions they’re going through. Maybe Sherlock left some lethal chemical out to dry that’s making them fuzzy.

Their movements are aimless, there’s no organization to it, it’s just purely, incandescently… “Kind of..”

Wrong?

Right?

Ridiculous?

Romantic?

Wrong word, wrong word.

“—Juvenile school-dance,” Sherlock stops and then starts, “Romantic?” he blinks, that look on his face that says he’s processing a thousand and nine hundred ninety nine split-brain thoughts per second, then tips over to two-thousand, and gets frozen. But John doesn’t have time to piece together he actually said that out loud because he’s too puzzled by what Sherlock said.

“School dance ?” John retracts with a laugh, flashing an amused, amazed grin, eyebrows merging skeptically at a loss as to how he got there. But then recognition lights up on his face, knowing exactly to what his flatmate is referring— like sixth form except, as it appears from his botched comparison, no one ever asked Sherlock to dance. Seems a shame that Sherlock’s vast and comprehensive encyclopaedia of dance should come up short under the ‘informal’ tab for that reason, but John can rectify that.

"Like this," John takes a step forward, putting his arms around his neck, "you mean." John’s hands slide into place against his collar, running against the feel of posh Italian cotton, and suddenly they’re back in year eleven.

“Oh,” he says softly, just noting the correction, purely casual, nondescript. Sherlock’s otherwise contained and easy-going in his arms, to his surprise, even when his digits accidently card through the line of curls at the nape of his neck, he stays perfectly still and doesn’t react.

John smiles in amusement and a pleasant sense of vindication, leaning forward to steal a glance at that unremarkable, unreadable face. It’s worthy of a headline, the scandalous Sherlock Holmes and his scathingly sharp tongue with nothing clever or stupefying to say. On the contrary, he’s intriguingly quiet, ‘being weird’ so to speak (atypically weird), which John almost finds cute, until he realises why he sees it that way; the numb, carefully blank line of mouth, the subtle elusion of eyes that won’t meet his, vaguely reminds him of some poor, dour schoolboy detained after-hours in the classroom, harbouring a borderline-painful crush on his teacher but unable to muster the courage to voice a confession that is, in any case, hopeless. John momentarily wonders why he made that association, or what that makes him in the analogy, but ultimately he feels a twinge of remorse for evoking that expression. Perhaps he’s crossed some sort of line there?

Well, of course he did, the whole exercise is a boundary crossing zig-zag. Come to think of it, he supposes slow-dancing the typically female role should send off all kinds of alarms and error messages in _his_ head, but somehow it doesn’t. All he can think is how if no one asked him to dance, it was a waste.

“And my hands are where?” Sherlock eventually returns, analyzing the new arrangement like it’s a Tetris puzzle and.. possibly having an Asperger’s moment.

John contemplates the awkwardly-phased question with a thoughtful look at the ceiling, chewing his cheek. “Let’s aim for PG,” he decides with a confident smile.

“PG, parental guidance PG?”

“That’s the one!”

He says that like Sherlock’s a golden retriever that did the right trick.

Sherlock frowns, looks confused, and in the end he just guesses, placing his hands on John’s hips, clasping around his back so that his arms ring around John, like John’s ring around him.

As he,              by necessity,                comes closer,

the height difference becoming more

apparent,

John feels a touch of awkwardness at the intimacy of it,

of being herded against him,

close enough to count the threads of his shirt.

Sherlock feels it too, though he doesn’t say anything, gone inconspicuously quiet again. He brushes against the top of John’s ear, and John flinches at the unexpected tickle of it, which makes Sherlock stall hesitantly with an apologetic air of sorts, not sure what to do. In seeking to free his road-blocked friend, John stops preoccupying himself with trying to spare him a noseful of ash blonde hair, instead leaning his head against his jaw a little so as to say he’s not allergic to him— or his particular strain of cooties.

Sherlock’s gaze is directed ahead at the drawn curtains over John’s shoulder that dim the flat, and John is face to face with the necktie Sherlock isn’t wearing. He feels his eyes meander upward toward Sherlock’s, by gravity and not by design, he argues antagonistically to himself.

"I don't know what else to teach you," John looks up and sees that Sherlock is looking down at him with those “only-for-John” eyes he doesn’t realise he’s doing. John can only hope he’s not doing the same back, but in vain.

"Waltz."

"You already   know   waltz," he drawls aghast.

"Do I? I can't be sure it's not ‘Bolero’," John says that funny like he has no idea what that is, because he really doesn’t. Sherlock looks amused with him, possibly because he’s god-awful at Spanish.

"John, I assure you, you know waltz backward and forwards— maybe even up-side-down and in loop-de-loops for all I know. You know waltz in ways I don’t. You know waltz like I know ash.” John’s eyebrows quirk upward. Sherlock’s very serious about ash.

“You’re.. immaculate.”

John thinks he hears crickets. “At waltz,” John fills in for him in the span of emptiness.

“Yes,” Sherlock replies dismissively, like that’s marginal, negligible, a given even, what he just said obviously John.

Then it cleverly occurs to him, “Well, there is one thing I could show you—” he muses, his voice mysteriously deviously DL as he steps forward and bridges the gap John’s left— a line personal space between them made by leaning back, now crushed to a sliver between the planes of their chests. Sherlock’s arms close against his ribs and fasten around his frame, hands sweeping against the cable-knit of his jumper, bringing John forward so that his elbows narrow around Sherlock’s neck. It’s gradual, and natural, and John doesn’t even notice, having gotten himself casually lost in the depths of Sherlock’s mind palace.

“You know you could try dipping her backwards,” he suggests, holding John and John holding him back in what is, essentially, an embrace, chests pressed together with slow, rhythmic breaths.

“How does that work?” John says, Sherlock’s non-tie introducing itself to John’s crew-neck as his starchy dress-shirt smoothes against John's corded jumper. John’s breathing in blood and formaldehyde masked by disinfectant, and Sherlock’s breathing in disinfectant and latex masked by bleach. John feels the square of nicotine gum lining Sherlock’s breast pocket and the prominence of his ribcage filling out and in, whereas Sherlock feels the buttons of John’s collar shirt beneath the layer of his jumper, lining down to the rectangular sharpness of his belt clasp.

“Shall I demonstrate?” Sherlock offers, eliminating the last shred of buffer space between them by leaning down with the look of John’s greatest weakness—soft, captivating eyes so distracting it takes John the whole of a minute to be pulled out of their depths and realise that… he’s loosing altitude.

“What? No, no, wait—” John gasps with an airy, nervous laugh. Tilted back in Sherlock’s hands, he’s hanging onto him for what seems like dear life, ribcage compressed against Sherlock’s, pattering and threatening to explode. His eyes are in deadlock with Sherlock’s, flashing a caged animal look—a pristine rendition of a deer in the headlights, wild wide-eyed and vivid, lit-up blue. Though the amused smile tugging tenuously at the corners his parted lips suggests he’s laughing a little at himself.

“Might be difficult for someone with trust issues,” Sherlock admits, finding it significantly harder to breathe with John’s wingspan wrapped around him like an anaconda.

You think so?   John’s expression blinks wordlessly. He rights himself, shifting his body upright again so his hold softens, kindly relieving Sherlock of his death grip.

“That was the one test I could never pass,” he states it blandly, a true lost cause.

“You think I would drop you John?” Sherlock smirks at him playfully, that bottomless, baritone voice reverberating with (faux) candor. His nose dips close enough to feel the glow of warmth tinging John’s, who is blushing, probably, but who wouldn’t? Sherlock is much too indecently, breath-baitingly close, playing the equivalent of footsie for noses with him. Good grief.

“Well, I don’t know, Sherlock,” John shrugs, so very wry, “That’s the point.”

“Let’s find out, then,” Sherlock murmurs with his voice velvet and eyes smitten. His hands are pressing up on the small of his back, pinning his jumper and checkered shirt in like drapery, tilting him back an inch.

The move is to John’s immediate dislike and the hand tightening strenuously on Sherlock’s shoulder lets him know it. He feels a disturbing sensation travel up his sciatic, a ghost of a tremor he hasn’t felt in years, the post-traumatic limp rearing its ugly head, and his mind flashes back to when he couldn’t walk without a cane. He can’t pinpoint why the psychosis has picked this moment and tries frantically to suppress the fresh surge of panic, a self-reinforcing, down-spiraling mental trap he’s loathe to fall into again, but any semblance of control is quickly slipping through his fingers, like sand in a sieve.

“Sherlock—” His voice sounds squeezed. He’s breathing rapid again, vexed, shallow, short, little breaths.

“Don’t you trust me John?” Sherlock’s calm voice reverberates against his ear, and John finds it nothing short of blissful how it mellows him, gliding smooth, gleaming golden like running honey. John looks up to find Sherlock's calm gaze on him and feels a tumbling landslide of relief, the demonic paradoxical wiles of his brain— rabbit-traps and rabbit-holes— done away with, long forgotten. Sherlock is mercifully there— smiling and composed and perfect— his embrace holding him up, holding him together so he can walk and run and dance with him, as if he weren’t a physiological mess fraying at the seams.

“No,” he replies, chin withdrawn. Decidedly not. Sherlock is practically beaming, never a good sign. John’s stomach flips watching the ungodly smirk play on his mouth. John would be a certain kind of idiot not to realize he’s in danger right now, but the problem is he’s a worse kind of idiot, the kind that likes it.

Sherlock is leaning above him, cradling more and more of his weight, and John feels himself swaying backward, their noses aligned, touching so that he’s staring down the end of Sherlock’s nose, not his own. It’s ridiculous. The more John tries to avoid him, the further Sherlock leans in, constantly nudging John back. It’s flirtation, really, it is.   Even if   the closest thing to romantic attraction Sherlock has ever felt has been to a   skull and that it’s in that sense John supposes he does have a romantic bone, though not one in his body.  

“I think…” Sherlock trails as John’s eyes make their way in small, shy increments, up to his. “…you’re mistaken.” He says, his voice is too silver and the smile on his lips too sinful, there’s practically a warning label typeset on his face, but John unfortunately is too much a sucker for handsome sociopaths not to eat it up, complacently pliant under those intoxicating, snake-charmer eyes.

But a gnawing feeling in the back of his brain demands attention, until his vestibular system starts sending him messages of alarm in rapid succession that can’t be ignored. His eyes widen.

“See, if you didn’t, I don’t think you would be falling right… now.”

And there it is, that sinking, nervous feeling, the unmistakable and unforgiving pull of gravity taking over.

“No, no, wait, Sherlock-“ John scrambles, grabbing onto him like a cat with claws, dragging him off balance rather than stabling himself, and they topple chaotically onto the oriental carpet, a heap of limbs alternating slacks and denim. Sherlock is an unruly bushel of curls sprawled on top of John, trying very hard to contain himself, and failing.

“There. See?” John remarks, glaring at the ceiling in a perfectly-implausibly-straight, outstretched position, “Good we got that out of the way.”

 Sherlock is cracking up, not lifting his face from John’s jumper.

“Oh, shove off!” He grouches tetchily, warring with a full-on grin that’s threatening to break out on his face. He plants a hand on the head of curls in an effort to push the obscenity face-planted on his chest   off, but Sherlock proves unfit to balance himself and crumples onto the floor beside him in a giggle fit. John blinks at him in sheer disbelief, until his gaze sours into a petty, jaded glare, unsurprised but not unexasperated. The idiot really got a kick out of that, didn’t he, screwing around with some damaged person’s psychological trauma. Must be like the sociopath equivalent of playing pool.

“Sure, laugh away,” John says nonchalantly,   tromp over my mental health like it’s your backyard veranda, why don’t you,   “Just remember that   was a demonstration, one I intend to imitate when I dip   you.”

When Sherlock finally gets a hold of himself, he rights himself on all fours again so that he’s framing John on the floor, meeting John’s eyes with something of a more respectable composure. “Yes, but you wouldn’t drop me John.” he maintains, “That would be cruel.” He looks down at John, his eyes bright and brimming with amusement, his voice deep and destroyed like he’s just endured the worse kind of tickle torture. His appearance still looks tousled around the edges, his unbuttoned collar bent open, curls mussed appealingly, but he always looks a bit like chaos.

“Oh, and when you do it, it’s not?” John replies with sassy rhetoricalness complimented by a lazy hand gesture indicating a certain failure in the sleuth’s logic.

“Yes but I’m allowed,” Sherlock says by way of explanation, despite the fact that it explains nothing.

“And I’m not,” John scoffs.

Sherlock shrugs. The little shit.

John turns over on top of him,   a fiendish, threatening smile lurking beneath the look of generic, do-gooder niceness typically plastered on his face, staring the sleuth down with a deep, dark glare as if he might just pick a fight over this.

“Tell me, who says I can’t be cruel?” John asks, particularly pleased with the civil, coolly aggressive tone of voice that comes across, despite how his eyes betray that unshakable fondness he’s unable to temper down.

“You can’t. Not to me,” Sherlock laughs like John is being obvious, and John’s eyebrows contort in confusion. He slumps back down to sitting as though Sherlock has knocked the wind out of him.

What’d you mean? John frowns in disappointment.

Sherlock is sprawled comfortably on the Persian medallion-pattern carpet like a starfish, the back of his wrist laid out on his forehead, mouth curved into an all-knowing smile. John leans over him like he’s admiring the intriguingly beautiful depths of a tidal pool, hand planted on Sherlock’s further side.

He marvels at his frailty, the ethereal, unearthly paleness verging on anaemia, the skeletal frame and starved features resembling anorexia. His fringe folds backward on itself, revealing emaciated temples and engraved cheekbones, and John muses how the architecture of his skull is such an incredibly brittle cage for the roaring engine within.

But then, inexplicably, he suddenly feels at a loss, short of breath and helplessly, powerlessly overwhelmed by him, even though Sherlock hasn’t so much as lifted a finger. It’s as if Sherlock’s word is somehow law, or worse even, fact, with the power to disarm him, take him apart like a kitchen appliance, take his piece apart and reassemble it with filled carrots for cartridges— god, if he did pick a fight, it wouldn’t be a fair one, would it?

“Why not?” John wants to know, leaning on one locked elbow with a fawning expression on his side-cast face.

Sherlock smirks like he has all the aces, that and a whole separate deck up his sleeve because he’s a cheat. And as if his ego needs any more fodder, he looks bloody perfect when he smiles.   Damn him.

“Because I’m your best friend.”

'Is it possible to fall over when you’re already fallen over, because that's very much what this feels like' is the question circling John’s reeling head. He looks momentarily fazed, unsuspecting, world-shaken, but, on second thought, he’s really not. He smirks.

Of course.

Of course Sherlock would say something blunt and brutal and below the belt, no matter if it turns John upside-down and inside out. Sherlock probably doesn’t even understand that, just that he can use it to his advantage: weaseling his way into his heart, twisting him around his little finger, getting away scot-free, and that’s all that matters. He wins. John is painfully aware there’s nothing he can say to that.

He looks into those knee-weakening eyes, the way they take you in and stop time like wormholes, the rings of iris such slippery slopes, like gravitational gradients skirting the precipice of the event horizon, the pitch-black and all-consuming vortexes of his pupils like the expanse beyond the point of no return, and feels suddenly fatalist, face-to-face with damnation, because he just knows.

Putting up a fight…

Against him or

Against the pull,

Is just…

Plain…

Foolhardy.

Contending with this man only makes you that much more of an idiot.

“You lucky devil,” he smiles ruefully, his expression one of blatant adoration, and Sherlock reflects back immaculately, a splitting image of requital, what looks damn-near like weakness, mortal weakness, flickering faintly in the far reaches of those dark spheres. But that’s something sociopaths do isn’t it— feigning mutuality with mimicry.

Is it play, is it pretense?

What are you doing to me, Sherlock?

**Author's Note:**

> Your fondness makes you weak John. WEAK.  
> Sherlock: Well he could say it’s better than being lonely like you, but that would be insensitive.  
> John: That was.. insensitive, Sherlock.  
> I think I’ve had enough of your snide remarks for today. You can go ahead put your 1000 pound bathrobe on and go to sleep.  
> John: That thing is a 1000 pounds?  
> Sherlock: Bathro- it’s a dressing gown. A dressing gown. And I don’t sleep.  
> Take John if you want.  
> Sherlock: Good night.  
> John: Wh— what are you doing, Sherlock I’m not your personal teddy!  
> Ok, so seeing that I just sent them off to bed together, this might hurt my argument a little.. but here goes: I'm not saying that a friend can ascend to the level of spouse, or even that a friend should be put on the same level as a spouse, I'm saying a friend can surpass that level. Gasp. Yes, a person does not have to be bound by some "sacred passionate sexual" relationship, to show you a certain amount of love and devotion, they can just... love you.  
> To read more about platonic male love :  
> http://www.experienceproject.com/stories/Think-We-Create-Too-Many-Rules-Around-Sexuality/2256049


End file.
